Pizza for Dinner

... because Lou's pot cooked little pieces of itself into our pasta tonight.

I tried to wash off all the black bits, but it was penne pasta, and the pot-shards just wouldn't come out of all those little tubes.

On the bright side, we threw the pot away:

... along with the pasta, as you see.

Lou also has a woodpecker that has drilled its way into the siding of the house, a skunk in the neighborhood, and a beginning drummer downstairs. I am marrying a very patient man. We won't be living here.

Double Check

I just edited my last post ... shouldn't have attempted blogging at 11:30 PM the other night, while feeling way overtired and frustrated.

In bringing up my "conversion", for lack of a better word (I don't like that one because it implies a change of religion, which is false), my whole desire is to share the overflowing joy I feel in Christ and His church. Instead, I came across as defensive, which is the last thing I wanted to do, and I apologize.

Time to start working now ... I'll be back soon. No more six-week blogless stretches for Jennifer!

Sunday, March 23, 2008

During the deeply symbolic service that is an Easter Vigil mass, the Catholic church this year received me as one of her own.

Albeit difficult to describe my array of new joys to a mostly Protestant readership ... if I still have a readership after six weeks of silence ... I couldn't go on with this blog without admitting openly that I am, now, Catholic. I would like to write out the whole story sometime, but the mental image of reader after reader staring horrified at their computer screens reminds me that Rome isn't generally forgiven in a day, however long it took to build her.

But the deluge of ideas, the thoughts and influences, hopes and fears of the months it took me to reconcile myself to the ancient Church beg me constantly for expression. This little blog of mine isn't going to turn into an extensive list of arguments for Catholicism, but parts of my thought and experience will work their way into these pages now and again.

This may naturally be hard for Protestants to take. But my hope is still "built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness." Don't give up on me, folks.

I'd like to ask one tremendous favor of all of you: Don't take everything you read/hear about the Catholic church at face value, especially if it comes from either the news media, evangelical books/commentaries, or ex-Catholics. The media has told three major, outright lies about the Vatican in the past ten months. Commentaries and other non-Catholic books have been responsible for some hilarious mistaken notions of what we believe (did any Catholic anywhere ever believe that papal decree could make fish 'not meat'?) And the sad, simple truth nowadays is that most ex-Catholics are ex-Catholics because they had no idea what they believed.

"There are not a hundred people in the world who hate the Catholic church, but there are thousands who hate what they mistakenly believe the Catholic church to be."--Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Catholic or Protestant, you all are my friends and I love you.